The workshop will focus on shaping the initial moments of encounter with complex, large-scale urban landscapes. It will reveal how engagement with our senses, intuition and empathy – phenomenological
and hermeneutic– can help boost our creativity and hence generate design ideas.
Plato realised that “the beginning is the most important part of the work“. Known as the butterfly effect, the science of complexity has taught us that initial conditions can have decisive and systemic
effects on what will come about in the future. Beginnings are similarly important in the design process.
Neuroscience research confirms that we are perfectly well equipped in our brains and hearts to understand complex situations such as urban landscapes ‘as a whole’, if only we can tap into our intuition
and empathy. It goes even further – our brains are explicitly ‘wired’ for grasping complex matters holistically and not just in parts.
The design process usually involves an ambition to create change and thus jumps directly to the future, disconnecting us from the present. The approach of this workshop, “Setting Out,” tests the thesis
that ‘simply’ focusing on what is in the ‘here-and-now’ of a landscape – experiencing it without deliberately searching for future solutions – will paradoxically generate ideas.